"Chelsea rising" at the contemporary arts center - New Orleans - Brief Article

Like SoHo in the '70s and the East Village in the '80s, Chelsea, currently stretching from 13th Street to 29th Street on the far west side of Manhattan, has recently been transformed by an influx of galleries. But while its predecessors were characterized by the close relationship between art, artists and their environs, the Chelsea phenomenon is quite different. Unlike the East Village, where galleries were opened in cheap and abandoned storefronts by artists-turned-dealers, or SoHo, where a community of artists predated the migration of galleries from uptown, Chelsea is largely a real-estate phenomenon. Established galleries pioneered the new area, buying up and renovating enormous industrial spaces, while others, priced out of an increasingly commercialized SoHo, followed in search of the area's comparatively lower rents.

The Chelsea art scene functions as a showcase for international artists and recent trends. This exhibition, organized by Contemporary Arts Center curator David Rubin, was a vehicle for introducing a range of recent art to the New Orleans audience. To create this sampler, he focused on younger galleries and emerging artists. The show presented the work of 23 artists or groups, each from a different gallery.

Rubin's curatorial bias was reflected in his selection of work encompassing painting, video, digitally manipulated photographs and installation. One common thread is the tendency to approach art-making as a response to a set of self-imposed rules. For instance, Erik Hanson (Derek Eller Gallery) attaches blobs of plaster to the top and bottom of plywood shelves, producing forms that resemble stalactites and stalagmites. Their forms and placement, as it turns out, are not random but are determined by the length and order of individual cuts from a David Bowie album. A group of modernist-looking abstract paintings made up of jazzy geometric and biomorphic patterns by Anton Vidokle (Audiello Fine Art) were created by removing the text from a set of paperback book covers published between 1945 and 1985. Similarly, light-box works by Daniel Pflumm (Greene Naftali) look like Minimalist compositions but are actually corporate logos with the brand names removed.

In viewing such works, it is essential to understand the rules that created them. Julie Moos's (Fredericks Freiser) otherwise bland, frontal photographs of pairs of adolescents gain interest when we discover that the subjects were selected from the same high-school senior class with the stipulation that they either be close friends or acquaintances. John Schabel's (Paul Morris) fuzzy photographs of people's faces were taken with a telephoto lens pointed at passengers in the windows of airplanes touching down or about to take off. Kiki Seror's (1-20) light boxes contain digitized compositions based on abstracted texts taken from sex chat-room discussions and can only be read with the help of special glasses.

Such neo-conceptual strategies produce works whose calculation is strikingly different from the flamboyant self-expression of East Village art or the adventurous rule-breaking of early SoHo. Given the similar approaches prevalent in last year's "Greater New York" show at P.S. 1, one wonders if Rubin has put his finger on a generational trend. It seems significant that Karin F. Giusti (Nikolai Fine Art), the oldest artist in the show, is one of the few to depart from this pattern. Her Safety Net is an enormous lace net interwoven with wire skeletons and lit so that it casts an intricate and haunting shadow, creating a seductive environment that pulls viewers in.

Otherwise, a cool detachment prevails. By offering an intriguing snapshot of the emerging generation and some of the strategies its members employ, "Chelsea Rising" shed light on what often seems like a frustratingly eclectic moment in contemporary art.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group